I did not want to do this so publicly but then I realised that if I did not I would do nothing about it.
In the picture where I have the purple top on I weigh just over a stone less than the picture of me with the white blouse on. The skirt is the same, it was a little loose in the purple picture and is a little tight in the white top picture.
When I was a student I walked EVERYWHERE as I could not afford to get the bus most of the tiem. I mean EVERYWHERE. Including sometimes walking a really long way to get to work and most of the time I walked up a really steep hill because, well, I lived at the bottom of it.
I also ate, pretty much always, food cooked from scratch as takeaways and convenience food were luxuries I could not afford. So I ate a lot of fresh vegetables from the market and a lot of quorn (it was cheaper than meat). Sometimes at the weekend I would treat myself to a Chomp and a bottle of Irn Bru.
When I moved to London I started being VERY sedentary. I used to commute for 3 hours a day and spent most of that sitting and reading. I then sat down at work, and at work we had free biscuits, which I ate pretty much every day. I ended up rigging my body to need sugar at about 11am and 4pm every day. I started to gain weight.
I then took up climbing (hurrah!) and changed jobs (hurrah) and though there was a communal biscuit tin I dipped in less often. My weight came down my confidence shot up and then I went through a massive break up.
Somewhere in that time I went from being okay as long as I was under X number of stone, to being X number of stone. Then somewhere a little later I went from being okay if I was under X+1 number of stone to being x+1 number of stone (for the American's reading this there are 14lbs in a stone, for those who use kilos - that is about 6.3 kilograms).
And then BOOM. I realised if I keep going this way I'll be saying it's okay if I am under X+2 number of stone and then X+3 and X+4 as it will keep going up and up and up by seemingly unnoticable increments until I go from being in the Overweight category for BMI right through Obese and into some pretty scary territory.
So I have a new target system and I'm trying to hold myself to account. The target is that every 4 weeks, I want to have lost 4% of my body weight until I am back where I think I should be. I don't have the body I had at 21 anymore so I'm not aiming for that, but I am aiming to be the size I am in my head so I can stop being freaked out when people who are "my size" turn out to be tiny compared to me!
Long term this is about health. This is about maintaining a way of living that is meaningful to me and healthy. Long term this is about me looking after my body because if not where am I going to live? Long term this is for my heart, my cholesterol levels, for avoiding diabetes. Long term this is so I can have children.
But it starts now. I cannot keep moving the goalposts to increase my chance of scoring. I know where I want to be and I will not get there by doing what I have been doing.
So sorry about multiple posts on weight and health lately but this really needs to be the day I wake up and say today is the tomorrow I have been putting everything off until. Today is the day to start. Today is a day to seize to ensure I can have a few more tomorrows.
That's it. It is on. I now need to do this.
